The Five Minute Guide to MacPorts
Underneath Mac OS X is Darwin, the Unix-derived core that provides the underlying foundation for Mac OS X, and although born of BSD, by default many tools you may be used to on a *nix system are not present.
And so in steps The MacPorts Project as an easy way to install open-source software onto your machine.
"The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac."
For example, I recently rebuilt my Mac with Snow Leopard, and needed wget back on the system. Here is a quick how-to on getting MacPorts + wget installed:
- Download and install the appropriate MacPorts dmg file from http://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/ - you can accept all the default installation choices. In my case, I downloaded MacPorts-1.8.0-10.6-SnowLeopard.dmg
- Once installed, open up a Terminal, and type 'sudo port selfupdate' and enter your password when prompted - this will make sure your local ports tree and base files are all up to date.
- Finally, installing a package is as simple as typing 'sudo port install <package name>', so in my case I installed wget with 'sudo port install wget'. All required dependencies are also automatically installed.
MacPorts currently has over 6200 ports distributed among 92 different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis. If you need further information, check out the official docs.
